


Bitter Nocturne

by sevendials



Category: Weiss Kreuz
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, F/M, Gen, Horror, Mystery, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-06-27
Updated: 2012-01-11
Packaged: 2017-10-21 05:22:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/221380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevendials/pseuds/sevendials
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A random attack on Ken and Youji's flirtation with a secretive young singer sets Weiss on the trail of a serial killer with a taste for blood. Is a vampire stalking the streets of Tokyo?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Laura and the Cats

**Author's Note:**

> Standard Copyright Disclaimer: _Weiss Kreuz_ , it's characters, indices, and all other associated intellectual assets remain the property of Kyoko Tsuchiya, Koyasu Takehito, Project Weiss and Movic, as well as the American companies responsible for releasing it in the West. This is a fan work written for no reason other than to share my love for the series. No profit is being made or ever will be made from the authoring of this fiction.
> 
> Author's Notes: I have, in my time, come across quite a lot of _Weiss Kreuz_ fanfiction involving the supernatural. This would be my small attempt to contribute. This story owes its creation to a discussion I had with Rokesmith on the subject of Vampire AUs which, being as we are who we are, very quickly turned into a brainstorming session. Though I'm pretty sure the actual storyline was 80% his idea because it nearly always is, I for some reason have ended up assuming authorial duties on this one. Here's hoping I can do justice to it.
> 
> Warnings: Strong language and violence from the start, some mature themes.

_“I’m not afraid of werewolves or vampires or haunted hotels.  
“I’m afraid of what real human beings to do other real human beings.”_  
Walter Jon Williams

The room was full of shadows, and full of smoke.

A window was open and the curtains were billowing in the breeze, but it didn’t seem to bother the smoke any. It just hung there unmoving, with absolutely nothing to connect to, while the curtains snapped and rustled to themselves. It was in no particular hurry, that smoke. It could wait all day.

Ken lay on his back amongst tangled, blood-spattered bedsheets and blinked up at the ceiling, and there’d been a creature on top of him. Some night creature, hot and heavy and wild-eyed, reeking of sweat and terror, and it had pinned his body beneath its own and lowered its head to gnaw at the bare flesh of his arm and throat, and now it was gone. Gone so completely it might never have been there at all, and maybe it never was. Maybe he’d dreamed it all. Maybe, Ken thought, maybe someone else still was, Christ knew he didn’t feel real any more either.

There’d been a girl with a shroud-pale face half swallowed up by the shadows she stood in, and she’d had something wrong with one of her eyes. If he raised his head Ken could almost imagine he might still see her, fragile and delicate and dressed in black, offering him nothing but the averted plane of one cheek as she gazed at the door.

I’m sorry, she would say. She probably _was_ sorry.

She could have had the common courtesy to go for a less complicated arrangement.

The last thing that Ken remembered with any real clarity was standing in a hotel corridor with a bouquet in his arms, checking the address on an order docket, and a girl who had something the matter with her eyes. Now there were roses and fronds of fern and Casablanca lilies everywhere and a damp spot on the sweep of the carpeted floor where the water had seeped into the pile, and it had taken Aya half a bastard hour to finish that order. Fuck, he was gonna be pissed. The vase hadn’t broken, at least. Ken supposed he could take that back with him.

He had said, Good evening. He had said, I’m sorry to disturb you, but I’ve got a delivery for Ai Tanaka.  
The girl stepped back to let him past. She said, I’m so sorry.

Had even that been real? Something of the sort must have happened, and yet now – and how strange it sounded! – now it felt almost like a scene from a stranger’s life. He might have been listening to someone else talk, watching from a distance as a boy gave flowers to a pretty girl, and stepped through an invitingly open door, and vanished.

If all she’d wanted was to crack him over the head, why spend 12,950 goddamn yen for the privilege? Never mind the cost of the hotel room. It was a lot to pay just to hit someone.

Pretty cheap for a life. No wonder she’d asked for a funeral arrangement.

Ken struggled to sit, blinking as the room seemed to swim before his eyes. His head felt heavy and strange, as if he had borrowed someone else’s for the afternoon and only now realized that the one he’d traded for was two sizes too large and every instinct he possessed screamed that he felt like crap, yet he didn’t. Where the Hell was the pain? He’d been hurt, he knew it, and yet Ken felt he could have taken on the world if only he hadn’t been so damned dizzy…

He leaned over the side of the bed, hair hanging in his face. He vomited and felt better.

The room was full of shadows and full of smoke, and it reeked of roses and the metallic tang of spilled blood. There was blood on the sheets, still warm and wet, looking almost black in the half-light. Like pools of ink or blood in a _manga_ , color optional. My blood, Ken thought, but it was just that: a thought. It, like the smoke, had nothing to connect to and no relevance to anything. Just he was bleeding somewhere, in terrifying, desperate amounts, and it didn’t hurt.

It should have hurt. Ken struggled to push himself upright again, scrabbling at the sheets with one hand. Couldn’t get a grip. The bedsheets felt slippery beneath his fingers. Muttering something that could have been a curse or a prayer or nothing at all, Ken dragged himself back onto the bed and upright, wiping at his mouth with the back of one hand. _Christ_. He was breathing too hard and too fast, sweat pearling up across his shoulders, his back. His legs were tangled in the bedsheets. _Oh, Christ_ —

His right arm looked like he’d been using it to play Fetch with the biggest Doberman on earth, and the dog clearly hadn’t wanted to stop playing.

For a moment Ken just stared in sickened fascination, watching heavy droplets of blood crawling in slow and ticklish skeins down the pallid, mangled skin of his arm. It spattered his clothing, it seeped slowly into the sheets and it hardly seemed real, either. Spellbound, he brushed the tips of his fingers against ravaged flesh and the blood was warm to the touch, warm and sticky. It felt real, at least.

For a moment he wondered whose arm it was and if its owner knew he was bleeding to death.

I’m sorry, said the girl with the broken eyes. I’m so sorry.

 _Tourniquet_ , something small and persistent murmured in a voice that sounded rather like Omi’s. Undertone of, finally paying attention, are you? Even if it wasn’t Ken who was bleeding, whoever the arm belonged to needed help. Ken reached behind him, fingers groping for – _there_. Clumsily, his stained fingers leaving smears of gore across the clean white fabric, Ken shook the pillow from its case and tore the slipcover to shreds with nails and teeth. _Tourniquet_. He fumbled for the longest, largest strip and carefully drew it tight about his upper arm, pulling until the bloodflow eased, then tying it in place with a hard, mean little knot.

Had to get help. Had to get help before he or whoever that arm belonged to bled out… Ken fought to free himself from the sticky, clinging sheets, fought to stand. Someone had cut the cord of the phone that sat by the bed and it wasn’t even a surprise. This had been planned, right down to the flowers that had scattered on the carpet. Stock was out of season. Everything was out of season this late in the year. ¥12,950 was a lot to pay to strew the floor with flowers…

Ken had known he’d forget the vase. Stupid really, leaving empty-handed after all that. He stumbled toward the door, barely noticing that he was crushing the flowers underfoot. Someone thoughtful had left it half-open, leaving the light from the hallway spilling into the shadow-veiled room. Though the view was of nothing more interesting than a slice of a carpeted hotel corridor, a blank-faced and blameless expanse of white-painted wall, Ken felt himself starting to smile. He nudged the door open with one foot, slipped through into the corridor and how did they cope, how were they supposed to see when it was so bright? The light had him blinking and rubbing at his eyes with the heel of one hand. It hurt. The light _hurt_ , and the smoke just hung there unmoving.

The smoke could wait all day, but not Ken. Not Ken. _Had to get help_. Okay. _Okay_. Had to find a lift, or the stairs. Maybe there’d be someone he could talk to who would tell him what to do—Get help, Ken. Help the guy with the fucked-up arm, maybe himself, or… could have been another man trapped back there, could be he’d left him lying in the sheets.

It might have been easier if he’d known whose feet these were. It wasn’t funny at all, but Ken was giggling. Drunk on duty. Must be they’d given him some whiskey, the girl in black had gotten him drunk and then the creature had come…

He stopped short. There was a figure at the far end of the hall: a woman by the looks of her, struggling to turn a key that had become jammed in a recalcitrant lock.

“Hey,” Ken called, and his voice rasped uncomfortably in his throat. “ _Hey_!”

 _Help_.

She must have noticed him because she raised her head. Her hair slipped back across her shoulder, and he just about caught a glimpse of the pale smear of her face before her painted lips parted in a perfect O of shock and, wrenching at the door handle, she ducked into her room and slammed the door behind her.

Well fuck you too, lady.

Ken sighed. Dragging his fingers against the wall – at least he knew that was there, it had to be because his fingers were bloody and they left gory, printless smears tracked against the pale paintwork – he started down the corridor, cautious as a three-day drunk trying to stumble through a sobriety test. Emergency stairs, they were the closest… Omi was gonna be pissed, he’d dropped the flowers and now here he was stumbling home wasted and it would have been so easy to sit down here. It would be the easiest thing he’d ever done, just sitting down and closing his eyes. Keep moving. The legs had nothing to do with him, but he couldn’t stop. Keep moving…

Just keep moving. A man was bleeding to death somewhere and it might even have been him, _had to get help_ —and the world looked blurred and vague as if he were trapped behind a curtain of gauze, him on one side, everything else in the goddamn universe on the other.

It seemed to take a private eternity for Ken to find his way to the stairwell. Penned in by blank walls painted an insipid shade of cream, stumbling past closed door after closed door, he might just as easily have been trying to chase rainbows as searching for the stairs. It felt for all the world like being trapped in an endless, featureless maze, running from nowhere in particular toward nothing at all. It was a scene from a half-forgotten dream, not a good dream either. A dream that was all repetition, the brain filling up the blank hours between dusk and dawn.

 _Fire escape_.

Ken almost fell onto the crash bar, was pitched off his feet when the emergency doors swung open before him and sent him sprawling onto the landing of the fire stairs. It should have hurt, but it didn’t.

For a moment the boy simply lay there, blinking out at the rush-hour crowded street spread out before him. The road was clogged with cars, the sidewalk cluttered with the usual extras, pinstripe commuters and sway-hipped secretaries and the inevitable knots of schoolgirls, their skirts pinned up several inches above regulation length and bare knees goose-pimpling in the evening chill. It could have been any street in any city, anywhere and here he was lying dazed and breathless and shivering on a fire escape, just watching it all as if it had nothing whatever to do with him. Grabbing the railings in front of him, Ken dragged himself back to his feet.

Two flights down and he had tripped and lost his footing, crying out more in surprise than in fear or pain, snatching for the guardrail beside him. Ken’s blood-slick fingers closed about the handrail for a second, no more, and then his grip had failed and he was falling. He caught his head a sickening crack on the treads of one of the stairs and landed in a crumpled heap on the landing, caught halfway between the sixth floor and the seventh. He probably should have tried to find the lift, after all…

He couldn’t move, and it didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter at all. Nothing mattered to Ken but the chill of the evening – and hadn’t he had his jacket on when he left the store? _Christ_ , that had better not have gone missing – and his own laughter bubbling up in his throat. Still there was no pain. Somewhere on the edge of hearing he imagined he could hear the sound of an alarm. He must have been dreaming all along and now, Ken thought as his eyes slipped closed, _now_ it must be morning.

That was it. It was morning, and the dream would come to an end.

All he had to do was wake up.


	2. Something More than Night

The phone call just put the cap on it: it was another one of those days.

If anyone were to ask Youji’s opinion it was as much the fault of the weather as it was anything. The day showed gray through the shop windows, the sky was clogged with clouds like drifts of filthy city snow, and everything looked so dark and dreary the sun might as well have phoned it in. The women bundled themselves up in boots and scarves and heavy winter coats, and it was hardly worth the time to mentally peel away the wrappings in the hope of discovering a pretty one cocooned beneath it all. Custom was slow and time passed slower, and even the schoolgirls didn’t seem inclined to dawdle.

It was getting too late for an afternoon delivery, but when the order came in Ken had said he’d take it round anyway. It wasn’t like any of them had anything better to do…

The truly weird thing was that when the phone call came, he hadn’t been worrying. He hadn’t been anxious at all. God knew what he had told himself Ken was doing staying away so long, Youji only knew he wouldn’t have blamed the kid for a minute if he’d decided not to hurry back. He must have told himself Ken had gone for a coffee or stopped for food. It was only exactly what he’d have done if he’d been doing a delivery on a day like this, when all he had to come back to was a near-empty shop and the pleasure of his teammates’ company. Bad weather never did bring out the best in them.

In retrospect it was a terrible explanation, but at the time it was truly what he’d thought.

Yes, he knew a Ken Hidaka. But he couldn’t have been injured – he was delivering _flowers_ , for God’s sake!

How much trouble could a guy get into delivering flowers? Youji had asked the woman on the telephone that – what, Ken’s in hospital? What did he do this time? – and she had simply hesitated, then told him again that Ken had been attacked ( _attacked_? The boy was an assassin, how the Hell could anyone—) and was in surgery, and that his injuries were serious but not life-threatening. He had asked the same thing to Omi as the boy scrambled into Aya’s stupid Porsche, dumping a bag full of Ken’s belongings down on what passed for the back seat beside him, though Omi hadn’t known the answer either.

Now, standing in a too-bright room and gazing at Ken (looking younger and paler than Youji thought he had ever seen him, dressed in an oversized hospital gown and giving them a wan and weary smile more because he didn’t know how else he should be looking at them than because he genuinely felt like smiling) it was all Youji could do not to ask him the same thing.

“Who,” he said, because he had to say something, “do you think you are, Lucy Westenra or something?”

But the blood they were giving him back was the blood of a stranger and, fresh from the freezer, it would be cold.

Ken really did not look good. If there was one thing an ordinarily healthy-looking kid like that didn’t take to, it was pallor. He hardly looked like himself at all. Maybe it was his attitude, maybe the way he held himself but it was easy to forget just how _small_ a guy Ken really was until you saw him like this. Saw him lying too still and too quiet, almost lost against a clutter of pillows and a tangle of tubing in a bed that seemed too large for him, and gazing at nothing with a vague, half-distracted look in his eyes as if he were having difficulty focusing. Worse, Ken looked drained, as if even raising his head would have been too much for him…

He hadn’t understood, Youji could see that in his eyes. From somewhere by his side he thought he heard Omi, his head bowed as he crouched on the floor and placed Ken’s nightclothes in the bedside locker, sigh.

Ken just looked at him. He said only, “I hurt my back.”  
“Your _back_?” Youji echoed. “How’d that happen? I thought—”  
“I fell,” Ken said. He pulled a face. “Must have. Don’t remember. I—” He broke off, as if he didn’t know what he was supposed to say next. Swallowing, Ken gazed down at his bedsheets, at his left hand lying palm-up and the IV line that skewered his wrist. “I did something, they… don’t _think_ it’ll last but they can’t say, not before the swelling goes. They… I fell, it’s my fault—”  
“Spit it out, Ken.”  
Ken squeezed his eyes closed, just for a second. He said, “I can’t walk. I – _Christ_ , Youji. They said I couldn’t even stand. I… I don’t know what to do, tell me what to do!”

Youji stared at him. He knew he should be trying to console his friend. Knew damn well what he should do now was say something comfortable and safe – doctors always fear the worst, Kenken, you’re going to do just fine – but there were no words. Everything sounded so trite, so silly, and no comfort at all. Dammit, this would have been so much easier if Ken’d only had the grace to be a pretty girl…

(The rest of it – the thick crepe bandages wrapped about the length of his right arm, the gauze pad taped to the side of his throat, barely seemed to matter. They were just details, unimportant ones at that. Ken couldn’t _walk_ —)

So he just stared. Ken – and if he wasn't about to cry, he certainly hadn't been that dejected over Gamba Osaka getting knocked out in the third round of the Emperor's Cup – Ken was really looking for him to say something reassuring, but when the only thing that came to mind was ‘Well, maybe Kritiker won't pull a “He knows too much” and just put you at a desk’, horrified silence was almost a better idea. Okay, he could go with that. Maybe Omi would pick up the slack.

“Well,” he said, “I hope you get better. Because I don’t think you wanna find out what our retirement plan’s like.”  
“What?” Ken blinked. He stared at him. Well, good. Ken made more sense angry than drowning in self-pity. “Youji, if I heard that right I’m gonna break your jaw.”  
“Kenken, if you think I’m bending over so you can punch me, you must have hit your head harder than I thought.”

Ken glared groggily at him, raised one finger in salute then slumped back against the pillows; for a moment there was nothing more. Just the grumble of traffic and, somewhere just beyond the door to Ken’s room, the quiet sounds of the hospital as it wound down for the night; a door creaking closed, the quick, purposeful steps of a nurse, and the rattle of bottles and jars on an overburdened trolley. A sudden slam broke the imperfect silence: Omi had pushed closed the closet doors. Now the boy was scrambling gracelessly back to his feet, placing one hand on Ken’s shoulder. Ken blinked, glancing up at him: probably no bad thing when Youji hadn’t quite been able to keep himself from giving Omi a sidelong glance. About time you filled in, kiddo, I was beginning to think _I’d_ have to do it…

“Try not to worry so much, Ken-kun,” Omi said. “And don’t give up. You can still move, right?”  
“Kinda,” Ken said quietly. He seemed to be having difficulty keeping his eyes open. “I… gotta stay in bed. Doctor said six weeks.”  
And Omi smiled, and his smile was bright and midsummer-warm. “You can manage that, can’t you? Look, you can still move – that’s already a good sign, and you’ll only get better as the bruising heals. I don’t think six weeks in bed means missing much at _this_ time of year, and when it’s over with any luck you’ll be fine. You can cope with that, right, Ken-kun?”  
“I guess,” Ken said. He didn’t sound very sure.  
“I’m sure you’re going to get better,” Omi told him. “I can’t believe you’ll settle for any less, will you?”  
“And to think,” Youji lamented, raising his eyes heavenward, “I’d be glad for the excuse for a six-week lie-in. This is wasted on you, Hidaka, absolutely—”  
And realized that Ken wasn’t listening. “Who’s there?”

There were strangers in the corridor, talking low and clipped and urgent: a young man’s voice – it sounded an awful lot like Aya’s – raised as if in protest, then a woman’s, brisk and cool and only utterly professional, cutting him off. Youji strained to listen, but it seemed he’d tuned in five minutes too late. For a moment nobody spoke at all, then Aya pushed open the door and, in a curiously old-world gesture that seemed somehow out of place from him, held it open for a young woman before slipping quietly through after her. For all the narrow wire-framed glasses, the gray pants suit and the boyishly short black hair, it was Birman all right.

Birman and, following in her wake, a brace of detectives, one old and one young just like in the movies. She glanced over at Ken, nodding almost imperceptibly. Play along, the look in her eyes said. We’ll square it all at our end…

“Ken,” Aya said. “The police are here.”  
“The police?”

Once again, Ken hadn’t understood at all.

“They need you to tell them who attacked you.”  
____

How much trouble could a guy get into delivering flowers? Right now the answer was _plenty_. Ken was a man doing a job, a job that brought him into other people’s homes and businesses, and that was all he’d had to be. Insofar as there was a pattern, he had fit it.

Five people had been killed so far, starting with a postal worker, then a college student working for a noodle bar whose sole selling point was offering free deliveries in a three-mile radius. The press had caught on with the third victim, a babysitter found dead in a rented apartment in Nakai. She was a high-school student, an unremarkably cute sixteen-year-old subsidizing a shopping habit, but it had been the last victim they’d really gone crazy for. Mackenzie Martin. She’d been an Australian, a pretty blonde graduate who had come to Japan to teach conversational English, who had turned out to be supplementing her paltry wages by giving private lessons under the table. She’d left her apartment one evening three weeks previous, telling her roommate she was going to meet a friend in Omotesando. They’d found her body in a Shinagawa goods yard four days later, throat ripped open as if she had been savaged by a wild animal.

And last night there’d been Ken, his arms full of funeral flowers, walking blindly into the same trap and God only knew how come he alone had been spared to stumble out again. Ken isn’t an assassin any more, Birman’s presence had murmured. He isn’t a dead man walking. Right now he’s just an ordinary shop boy who was assaulted while doing his job, and he’s the best lead we have.

Best lead, huh? That was a joke. Youji had been there when Ken gave his statement and the kid barely remembered where he’d been, let alone what had happened. The only thing he could tell them that they hadn’t already known was there was a woman involved and there was always that, in Youji’s experience, somewhere along the line…

The shop seemed quieter without him.

“Oh, Ken-san isn’t here today…”  
“Of course he’s not, didn’t you _hear_? He’s in hospital! The vampire killer attacked him!”  
“God, Toshi-chan, are you serious?”  
“It’s true! I saw the news last night, and I knew it was him!”  
“That’s so scary! Is he going to be all right?”

The girls at least missed Ken: to everyone else he was just another piece of office gossip and by sundown they were already starting to forget him. The midday news led with the story that another body had been found, a man who could have been anywhere between twenty-five and forty who had been attacked walking home from a bar. Identification was proving difficult. Investigators, said the reporters, believe there may be a link between the murder and the attack on an eighteen-year-old shop boy in Shibuya ward yesterday evening…

Ken became a footnote to a graver, more glamorous crime. Survivors were good in theory but not when the police refused to give their names, still less interview rights.

And nothing happened. An enterprising reporter had shown up at half past two and Aya had headed him off through a combination of icy looks and deliberate obstructiveness: demotic Fujimiya for ‘no comment’. That had been over an hour ago and nothing had happened since save for the girls showing up, all school plaid and loose socks and glossy hair, and all of them strangely subdued. One of the braver ones shyly handed Youji an envelope and asked if he could give it to Ken next time he saw him, if it wasn’t too much trouble. Weird how the day seemed to drag, stuck in the shop with Aya for company; weird how much busier it seemed.

Youji hadn’t really noticed it before, but in his own way Aya was every bit as lazy as he himself was. The guy just sloped in, propped himself up against the wall and stayed there. If he was practicing for the All-Japan All-Comers Glaring Competition he was doing great, but as far as attracting actual customers went it lacked something.

It didn’t stop her, though. It would have taken a lot more than the new guy to intimidate her.

Youji was glad when the girl came in. She stood by the display cases, feigning an interest in an arrangement of roses and lilies as she quietly waited for her presence to be noticed – and it had been, of course, but Youji saw no harm in letting her wait a little longer. It would, after all, give _him_ a little longer to admire the view and after a whole afternoon stuck with nothing easier on the eye than Aya and his godawful sweater, he figured he’d earned it. She was a pale girl, cold as moonlight and easily as beautiful; but she knew it and, if Youji were any judge, she was playing up to it. After that she didn’t seem quite as interesting.

Easy, then, to look at her objectively. She was a lily of a girl, tall and pale and graceful, and her eyes were intelligent, but she wore too much black and held herself in a manner that was far too studied. She was the kind of woman who expected to be looked at and took it as her due: Youji couldn’t exactly object to that, but it could get a shade wearing.

Moments like this he felt the loss of Ken keenly. He couldn’t exactly ask _Aya_ what he thought of the loligoth thing.

Better get on with it, then. He clambered to his feet, waving Aya warningly away from the girl never mind that he hadn’t been going to approach her in the first place, and drew over to her side.

“Can I help you, miss?”

And she really _had_ been looking at the flowers after all, because she started when she heard him speak.

“Oh! Oh of course, yes.” Her voice was pleasant, if low. “I was wondering if it was too late to order an arrangement?”  
Youji smiled at her, and his smile was lazy and practiced. “For you,” he said, “I’m sure we can find time. I would never forgive myself if I let down such a beautiful girl.”  
“Oh, I’m sure you could have made it up to me somehow.” She had a nice smile, too, but the look in her mismatched eyes said it meant no more to her than it did to him. “Anyway, I was looking for something in white.”  
“White? What’s the occasion, a wedding?”  
“No,” the girl said, “Not a wedding. It’s for a… an acquaintance. They’re not well. I thought something like that?”

She jabbed one slender finger toward the displays, singling out a symphony in sad greens and whites. A traditional bouquet standing in a tall white vase, all crisp white roses and stock and Casablanca lilies, sprays of tiny daisies and fronds of fern. ¥12,950 with a ribbon of the customer’s choice, delivery not included.

Aya had assembled one of those only last night. Delivery for an Ai Tanaka, Room 802, Mets Shibuya Hotel.

“Like that?” Youji asked. “Well… yeah, it’s a pretty arrangement, but it might be a bit somber for a sickroom.”  
“You think so?” She sounded genuinely surprised.  
“Yeah, I think so. That’s a sympathy bouquet. That whole shelf is funeral flowers. You’d probably be fine sending those if you’re buying them for a close friend and you know their tastes, but— okay, put it this way. How well do you know the recipient?”  
She hesitated, averting her eyes and anxiously rubbing her upper arm. “Not… not well at all. We only met briefly.”  
“In that case you’d be better off with something more conventional. Look here.” Youji led her to the next cabinet along, gesturing to a shelf overburdened with vases of flowers in paintbox hues. “We sell a lot of these as get-well gifts. Most people favor bright colors if they’re trying to cheer up a hospital room.”  
“Well…” She smiled, meeting his eyes. “Okay, I’ll take your word for it. What would you recommend?”

But she didn’t like the basket arrangements, and the gerberas she thought were tasteless. Bright she could handle as a concept but magenta and orange daisies was pushing it. Okay, Youji said, what about a Summer Color arrangement? He pointed to a yellow and orange confection in a round glass vase. Something like that would make an excellent get-well present, and there was quite enough white and green in hospitals already without adding more.

“Are those lilies?” the girl asked. “I didn’t know they came in yellow.”  
Youji nodded. “Yeah, those are Canada lilies. It’s kind of a shame lilies are so associated with funerals, there’s a lot more to them than that. They come in pink too, you know?”  
“I never knew that. I – well, I’d heard of tiger lilies of course, but I always thought of them as so…”  
“Severe?” Youji asked.  
At that the girl gave a giggle, hiding a smile behind one pale hand. “Well, maybe… I was going to say sophisticated. I never really cared for bright colors much.”  
“Really? That’s kind of a pity. I think you’d find they suited you.”  
“I don’t think so.” But she was blushing slightly, tucking a strand of hair behind one ear. “How much would that be?”

She seemed surprised when Youji told her that for an extra ¥1,250 they could arrange for an evening delivery, since she probably wouldn’t want to wait around for the arrangement to be ready. Clearly this girl was far more used to receiving expensive flowers than giving them.

Maybe she just didn’t know what she was doing, but who spent ¥9,000 (not including delivery charge at ¥1,250) on an ill acquaintance, anyway? She really couldn’t know what she was doing. Sure, a sale was a sale and it wasn’t like Youji was going to tell her otherwise – and he could only blame Ken for that. Back injury or not, he didn’t like to imagine what the kid would have done to him if he found out someone had come in looking for an expensive arrangement and left with a bunch of daffodils. Still, it seemed a bit excessive when there were cut flowers right there…

“You get a gift card with that,” Youji said as he rung up her order, gesturing with his uncapped pen to a display rack stood by the register. “No extra charge. You want to include a card?”  
For a moment he didn’t think she would respond. She simply stood and fumbled her purse back into her shoulder bag, then nodded. “Yes,” she said, then again more decisively: “ _yes_. That one.”

Youji glanced down at the display stand to make a note of the card’s number, quirking one slender eyebrow in a silent statement when he realized which one she had chosen. Number eight, a pure white affair with a thin silver border and a stylized graphic of an arum lily running up one side. There was no other decoration aside from the five elegant silver characters printed along the top right hand side.

What on _Earth_ did this girl think she was playing at?

“Miss,” Youji heard himself saying, “are you sure? Those are really meant for funeral flowers—”  
“That one,” the girl said again. “And don’t worry about a personal message. Just the card will be fine.”

No name?

No, she said. No name. And turned to leave.

“Wait,” Youji said. “You didn’t mention a delivery address—”  
The girl just smiled. “They’re for your friend. The dark-haired boy. Tell him I hope he feels better soon.”  
____

“What’d you mean,” Ken asked, “ _strange_?”

Ken had known something was on Youji’s mind from the minute he sat down. The man’s smile was that one little bit too broad, his enquiries as to how Ken was (lousy, but ‘okay’ would cover it) and how his day had been (boring) were that one bit too perfunctory and when Ken asked how things had been at home he answered well enough, but seemed distracted. Youji fidgeted as he sat down, absently raking his curls out of his face, then doing it again when they all fell back into place almost immediately. He never did quite know what to do with his hands when he was feeling anxious, but couldn’t allow himself to smoke.

Youji may have been an accomplished liar, but Ken had seen his nonchalant act far too many times to be fooled by it any more. He might as well, Ken thought, have written ‘I need a cigarette’ on his brow and had done with it.

“They miss you,” Youji was saying. “You better get well soon, or we’re gonna have a lot of disappointed girls around…”  
Ken said, “What’s up? You’re acting weird.”

Half-screened by Youji’s hands, almost as if he were ashamed of them, there was a bowl of cut flowers resting on his knees. He didn’t quite seem to know what to do with the flowers either, but as if in response to the question, he thrust the bowl into Ken’s blanket-covered lap. Canada lilies, tulips and Monte Cassino: that would be a deluxe Summer Color arrangement by the looks of it, its rather fussy flourishes bearing all the hallmarks of having been assembled by Aya’s hands. What, Ken wondered, did that have to do with it?

“That’s why,” Youji said, rather gratuitously Ken thought.  
This didn’t help much when he still had no idea what the flowers were supposed to have to do with anything. “What the Hell are you talking about?”  
“You mentioned a girl last night,” Youji said. Then when Ken sighed, slumping back against his pillows and raising his eyes heavenward: “No, shut up, I know what you’re about to say and you can spare me it. What did she look like?”

Ken hesitated, gazing down at the flowers. They were still simply lilies and tulips: just flowers. They told him nothing.

He said, “You think she bought these?”  
“If the girl you saw last night was slightly taller than you, had a hime cut and wore too much black, then yes. Oh, and her eyes were different colors. One’s gray and one’s a sort of pale blue.”  
“Huh.” Ken frowned, an expression which in him implied nothing but thought. “Well… could be. Don’t know about the haircut but she definitely had something up with her eyes. Why’d you think she’d send me flowers, though?”

The question had seemed only reasonable to Ken, but from the look on Youji’s face, the way he raised his head as if he had been surprised in the middle of a daydream, it had caught his friend off-guard.

“I don’t know,” Youji admitted. “She was a… a strange sort of girl.”  
“What’d you mean, _strange_?”  
“Would you attack a guy then walk into the place he worked to say Hi to all his friends?”  
“Well… no,” Ken said. “No, I wouldn’t do that. Did she say anything?”  
Youji sighed, raking his hair from his face again and holding it there for a second. “Just the usual. I thought maybe she wanted to leave a message, but… Ken?”

Ken was thinking of something else. He’d glimpsed a flash of silver and white, half-hidden beneath the gaudy petals of the lilies. A card. Why a card? If she’d left no message what did she want to bother with that for? Curious in spite of himself, Ken pulled it free, carefully tugging it out with fingers that were professionally courteous of flowers, and felt himself starting to frown. Type eight, huh? But those were for funerals – at any rate, for the relatives of the newly-dead. Was this some kind of joke? He turned it over in his hands, hoping to find something that would explain this to him, but there was nothing save the two words printed on the front.

 _I’m sorry_ , it read. Ken pulled a face and let the card fall onto the covers.

“Yeah,” Ken said, “I bet she’s fucking devastated.”  
Youji gave him an apologetic smile. “Sorry, Kenken. I just figured you should know.”

He winced slightly as the legs of Youji’s chair scraped against the floor, looking up at his friend in surprise as Youji got to his feet and, without being asked, lifted the flowers from Ken’s lap. He placed the arrangement down by the windows, hesitating there for a second with his hands resting on the vase to gaze out at the world trapped just beyond it, and Ken watched him as he stood watching over nothing at all, and wondered what he was thinking.

“Anyway,” Youji said over one shoulder, breaking the sudden silence, “it seems pretty damning to me. If she wasn’t the girl she sure as Hell knows something. Too bad she didn’t leave an address or a name or anything, I could have gone looked her up for you…”  
“For me? Why’d you want to?” Ken asked. “It’s none of our business, Youji. It’s just dumb luck we’re involved. If you’re that sure it’s her why don’t you just call the cops?”  
“And tell them what? A girl came into the shop and bought you flowers. That doesn’t add up to anything the police can use and you know it. Sure, she knew you were the one who got hurt, but she could have found that out from any of the other girls. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”  
For a moment Ken said nothing, just gave Youji a flat, wary look. “I thought you thought she was the same girl.”  
“I do, Ken. But they won’t. You going to keep the flowers?”

It shouldn’t even have been a question. Certainly Ken shouldn’t have had to think about it. There’d been a girl with broken eyes and she had lured him into danger and apologized for it, then she had sent him expensive flowers from the store he worked in, as if she thought it would somehow make things better. What kind of a person _did_ something like that?

He should have just thrown them out, he knew that, or given them away at the very least. And yet—

He said, “Yeah. I’ll keep them.”  
“Really? You sure about that?”  
“No,” Ken said. “It just seems like the right thing to do.”

All the way home Youji had – how to explain it? It sounded crazy, but he had the strangest sensation that someone was watching.  
____

It wasn’t quite midnight and the hospital was quiet, or as quiet as hospitals ever got. The lights in the corridor were lowered; a brace of young night nurses sat at the ward receptionist’s desk thumbing through last month’s _ViVi_ , talking in whispers as they waited for something to do. In a quarter of an hour they would get up and, with a checklist and torch, they would go through the supplies in the crash cart. Until then there was nothing to do but read magazines and wait to be needed, and pretend that they weren’t bored.

Ken, lying awake gazing at the still-unfamiliar hospital ceiling, listened to them talking without ever once hearing the words and wondered why everything felt so strange.

He had woken in pain, instinctively groping for the handset of the morphine pump. Now he lay with one hand curled about the button and wondered how long it would be before the pump’s lock-out period ended and he could have another dose. Omi would have laughed if he’d only been here. Ordinarily the kid couldn’t get Ken to take so much as a headache pill and here he was lying flat on his back thinking longingly about morphia…

Sleep came first, though. It had to. He wouldn’t get better if he didn’t rest and he wouldn’t get any rest at all if his back didn’t stop hurting. The drug was a necessary evil.

The nurses had set up the morphine pump earlier that afternoon: the lecture, he supposed, must have come with the handset. The point, or so Nurse Harada had told him, was to manage his own pain – but the PCA pump would only be as effective as he’d let it be. Don’t you dare, she had said only half-jokingly, let me catch you trying to be _brave_ about this! Ken had nodded obediently and promised that he wouldn’t do anything of the sort, and wondered as he did so why nurses, like nuns, always left him feeling so confused and helpless.

Five minutes crawled past, then another five. Ken didn’t try to be brave. In time the pain subsided, but the feeling of peculiarity and essential _wrongness_ didn’t. The room seemed strange somehow, in a way he couldn’t quite define. It wasn’t just because it wasn’t his room and two nights weren’t long enough to become accustomed to waking up there: there was something out of place, something he could sense shouldn’t have been there even after a single night.

There was – wasn’t there? – there was something odd about the quality of the shadows in the far corner of the room, if only he wasn’t imagining it. They seemed (and even in his head it sounded crazy) somehow thicker than they should have been, as if there were something there, something that a less levelheaded soul might even have told themselves was the shape of a man.

If Ken had been the paranoid type, he might have fancied that even the silence felt wrong: there was something far too purposeful about it. It was the kind of silence you only got when someone else was trying very hard to be quiet. Might even have gone so far as to think he could feel the weight of someone’s eyes upon him…

But Ken was Ken and he blamed the morphine, and the dream he already couldn’t remember.

Sighing and turning over onto his side, Ken closed his eyes to search for sleep.


	3. Two Women

There hadn’t been much more that Manx could tell them, apart from why Kritiker was taking an interest in something that Youji had assumed would stay the police’s concern if it was anybody’s. All she knew about the so-called vampire killer – their target now – was all that the police knew, and that had filtered down to Weiss through the newspapers and Omi’s research already, research Omi wouldn’t even have conducted if the case hadn’t involved Ken. Say what you would about Omi, the kid looked out for his friends.

“We’re not investigators, Manx,” Youji had told her when she snapped the lights back on. “Even I’m not, not any more. Why is this our business?”  
“Am I to take it, then, that you wish to decline the mission?”

The woman’s voice was neutral, but her eyes were full of cold censure. Youji met that scornful gaze with a flat, steady stare of his own. Don’t even _try_ , Manx. Whatever Kritiker’s interest in this case was, it was not because of what had happened to Ken. It would have nothing to do with that, and he would not let Manx make it into that to force him into feeling he should want to take the case.

“I didn’t say that, Manx,” was all Youji said: he thought, _and you know I didn’t_. “What I wanted to know was why us. What can the four of us do that half the Tokyo Met can’t?”  
“He’s right.” Aya said, stepping away from the wall he had been propping up during the briefing. “This should be the police’s job. Why us?”  
For a moment Manx said, and did, nothing. Then she heaved a sigh, tapping her fingernails against the buff folder she still held. “Mackenzie Martin,” she said. “You probably haven’t been paying attention to the international coverage this case has been getting. Well, Persia has. The Australian media are already beginning to suggest the Japanese police are incompetent and Australian citizens are unsafe here. For that reason alone it would be… let us call it _prudent_ to bring this unfortunate affair to the quickest conclusion possible.”  
“So Persia wants us to take this guy out because we’re _faster_?” Youji asked.  
“Put crudely,” Manx said, “yes. To say nothing of rather more efficient. Should you get to the target before the police do, we will at least be spared the trouble and expense of a trial.”

She had always been cold. If a guy were to focus on the tumbled curls and the china-doll perfection of her face, and the frankly dangerous curves barely contained by clothing that had to fit because she was wearing it but still seemed somehow too small, it was easy to forget – but Manx was a hard, icy woman, and she always would be.

This wasn’t justice. The so-called _vampire killer_ (and that was a ridiculous, too-romantic name for someone who tore his victims apart) was a madman, that much was obvious. However cold and calculating his crimes were, whoever was helping him stay hidden, anybody capable of taking another man apart just because they were _there_ was out of his mind by definition. It wasn’t Youji’s place to say _no, you are beyond help_ , and put him out of his misery as if he were a foaming dog. This was a man, a man who – maybe – could still be dragged back from whatever dark place he had become lost in. Surely even a maniac like this deserved the chance to prove he was not beyond redemption?

But if he’d believed that even for a moment, why was he here at all?

Well, the slightly reproachful look on Omi’s face seemed to be saying, you _did_ ask.

“Don’t you think that’s kinda harsh?” Youji asked them. “Sure the guy’s a maniac, no arguments there, but… is there any reason he couldn’t just be arrested aside from it’d be easier not to? There are a whole lot of guys out there it’d be easier not to bother trying. _Rapists_. We don’t go after rapists.”  
“Nonetheless,” Manx said, “that is your mission.” Quickly and neatly washing her hands of the whole debate. “Do you wish to participate or not?”  
Aya nodded. Said, “Of course,” as if he felt the question had been entirely gratuitous.  
“Balinese?”

And there was the rub. It wasn’t about what Youji thought about it: the others, he knew, wouldn’t have thought. Even Ken wouldn’t have gone that far – he’d have hated it and thought dark thoughts about Christ and damnation, he’d have wished like crazy he could stop but he wouldn’t have said no and he would never have asked why. The why was dangerous, and Ken didn’t want to know. Youji shouldn’t have wanted that either, should never have wanted to _think_ : a hand was a hand was a hand. So we’re killing madman now? So then, Balinese, what are _you_ going to do about it?

Well, what choice did he have? No going back on a contract signed in blood.

“Oh, very well,” Youji said. “I’m on board. And I’ve got a pretty good idea where we can start looking.”  
____

The problem, of course, was finding her again. Tall, pale girls with long black hair weren’t exactly what a guy would call an uncommon a sight in Tokyo, and of all the things Youji had never assumed would bother him there was one of the biggest. Even the mismatched eyes wouldn’t help much; she was still one person lost in a crowd almost thirteen million strong. What the Hell good would a description do, when it could have fit any one of a thousand girls?

Youji knew where to start searching for the killer; too bad he had no idea where to find _her_ …

But in the end he didn’t have to. She came to them.

Two days later and there the girl was, slipping into the shop with a vaguely apologetic look on her pale face, as if she knew she’d been missed and was hoping they’d be glad enough to see her that they wouldn’t scold her for it.

Dressed to kill in a black and red number that looked like the bastard child of a kimono and a child’s party dress, she was strange and beautiful as a creature from a Gothic fantasy and utterly ridiculous all at once – and yet totally unremarkable. She had been transformed, somehow, into one more girl among many and for a moment Youji wondered how old she was. For all the make-up and the heavy high-heeled boots, the ribbons and lace and stiff black petticoats, she looked awkward as any schoolgirl. She hadn’t, Youji realized, dressed up in the hope of impressing him. It was simply that if she hadn’t had the armor of her clothes to hide behind she wouldn’t have been there at all.

She was, in short, no different from any other girl who showed up groomed to within an inch of her life in the hope it’d give her the courage to actually talk to him. The only difference was the packaging – and, perhaps, the motivation.

“Oh, hey,” Youji said, raising his head and shooting a glance at Aya. “Look who’s back.”

The girl must have overheard him. She colored, her grip tightening about the handles of her bag as – and she could have been simply nervous; it didn’t, Youji reminded himself, have to mean anything more – as she shot a longing glance back at the shop door and for a moment he feared she would turn and run, but she didn’t. She didn’t even move. Aya, for his part, spared her a single disinterested look and went back to propping up the wall. You can deal with it, Kudou.

That suited Youji. Smiling slow and lazy as a summer’s afternoon, he took a pace toward the girl, plucking a single red rose from a display of cut flowers and holding it up to her as if he were planning to hand it to her – then hesitated. He gazed thoughtfully between her and the flower for a few long moments, then shook his head.

“No,” he said. “Won’t do. Wait here a minute.”

She went with it. Girls, in Youji’s experience, tended to, if only to find out what in the world he thought he was doing. She was waiting when he got back, her cheeks mantled with the faintest suggestion of a blush – a blush which only deepened when Youji tucked a white gerbera behind her ear. The miracle was that he managed not to look like the most ridiculous man in the world in the process, but he supposed he could settle for managing second.

“What was that for?” she asked, and even her voice was only ordinary now.  
Youji merely shrugged. “It suits you.”  
“You think _daisies_ suit me?”  
“I think,” Youji said, “that you’re thinking too obvious. Roses, lilies… yeah, lovely flowers, but they’re not very individual. People get so hung up on safe choices they never stop to think what _they_ like. And you—” He gave her a smile. “Well. I still think you should give the gerberas a chance.”

The girl started slightly and reached, almost instinctively, for the flower, the tips of her slender fingers gently brushing against the petals: she colored, her lips parting just a little as she quickly lowered her gaze, but though she acted for all the world like every other startled girl Youji had ever met there was something wrong with the picture, something that rang strangely false. Just for a second, the look in her mismatched eyes had been almost guilty.

All she said was, “I didn’t think you’d remember me.”  
“You’re a difficult girl to forget,” Youji told her. “And you didn’t come here looking for flowers, did you?”  
The girl raised her head, and managed an awkward smile. “Well… is there anywhere we can talk?”  
“Café down the road,” Youji said. “You had lunch yet? I’ll pay.”  
____

Her name, she said, was Carmilla.

Youji and the girl had been in the café (an unremarkable American-style affair popular with the high-school crowd which prided itself on its authentic pastries and ice-creams) barely a minute before they were being ushered to a table by the window. Youji spared a nod for the waitress, a cute little thing with a ready smile and a head of tight honey-blonde curls, and for a moment he caught himself wishing he had only been there alone…

That was not, of course, what a guy should have been thinking with a pretty girl by his side, even if she was a potential killer – or, for that matter, wearing the strangest frock Youji had seen all week. He let the thought go, casually sprawling in his seat as the girl, still blushing, sat down opposite, perching uncomfortably on the edge of her own chair.

Youji had asked her name only to put her at her ease; he didn’t know how he felt that she had given him a fake one. It was no more than Aya did every day, but from this girl the small pretension left him unaccountably aggrieved.

“Carmilla?” Youji asked. “That’s never your real name.”  
“It is,” the girl countered, “if your name’s what people call you. They all call me Carmilla.”  
And who, Youji wondered, were _they_? “Okay, Carmilla it is. It’s…” Familiar? “A pretty name.” And familiar. “Damndest thing, though… I keep thinking I should remember it from somewhere.”  
“You probably do,” the girl said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “It’s from the novel.”  
“Novel?”  
“ _Carmilla_ ,” she said patiently. “By Sheridan Le Fanu. She was a vampire.”

Of course she was. They were always vampires.

But she had ordered a hamburger and fries and a strawberry milkshake. Beneath the hime cut and the elaborate black dress and all the other careful flourishes of her persona, there hid an utterly ordinary young woman. Youji wondered what kind of a girl she was. He wondered if Carmilla knew.

It was probably time to change the subject.  “Oh, before I forget. Ken says thank you for the flowers.”  
“Ken?” Carmilla asked, and for a moment she sounded genuinely confused. “Oh… yes, of course, Ken. How is he?”

Ken was okay. He was angry with everything, but that was merely normal; and bored out of his mind, but that was merely predictable. Nobody really _liked_ being in hospital and Ken took to being bed-bound about as enthusiastically as a cat would have taken to swimming lessons. Youji didn’t want to talk about Ken.

“Why,” he asked instead, “do they call you Carmilla?”  
She smiled, almost shyly. “Actually, it’s a stage name.”  
“Oh, you’re an actress?”  
“A singer,” she corrected him. “I’m in a band. Actually, that was what I wanted to talk to you about. I know we don’t really know each other and everything, but you were really helpful the other day and… well.” Carmilla smiled again, anxiously lacing her fingers together before her, and Youji realized he was thinking that he could start to like her like this. “I’m going to be performing at House of Usher, and I was wondering if you wanted to come? See, I’ve got these tickets…”

She broke off, swinging her bag onto the table and digging through the contents for a few frenzied moments, muttering a curse or two under her breath. Finally Carmilla retrieved two slightly battered-looking tickets from the depths and slapped them down onto the table – a quick, ungraceful, almost tomboyish gesture and there was that girl again, the one who ordered hamburgers and milkshake and dressed up only because it made her feel bold.

“I mean,” she said quickly, “you don’t have to come. But they’re yours if you want them.”

And raised her head in sudden bewilderment as Youji covered her hand with his own, pressing her fingers flat against the crumpled tickets as he gently squeezed her fingers.

“Carmilla,” he said, “I’d love to.”

How was it possible to lose track of time in the company of a woman who didn’t interest you at all? Between lunch and swapping cards – I’ll call you, okay? – and walking her to the subway, dusk had fallen by the time Youji got back to the flower shop to find Omi waiting for him at the register, a textbook spread open before him. He glanced down at it more out of habit than any expectation that it would be interesting, to be greeted with a thicket of incomprehensible equations. Honestly, kids these days.

“Omi,” he said, “please don’t tell me you’re reading this for fun.”  
“Oh, Youji-kun, you’re home.” Omi gave him a bright smile and got to his feet, the chair he sat on scraping slightly on the tiles as he stood. That smile told lies. “I need to talk with you for a second, okay? Momoe-san, I’ll be right back…”

Ignoring the disappointed pout on the face of the girl who’d been hovering by the till for the last five minutes – Youji couldn’t help but give Omi a funny look for that: a pretty girl in a cute little uniform five meters from his elbow and he was doing _calculus_? Kid had his priorities backward if you asked him – the boy led the way into the back room. Youji followed, pulling the door to behind him and leaning back against it as Omi gazed up at him, all thoughts of definite integrals chased from his mind.

“Aya-kun said you saw the girl,” was all he said.  
Youji shrugged expressively. “ _Might_ have done,” he told him. “Aya’s gotten ahead of himself again.”  
“Might have done?”  
“It might have been her,” Youji said, “but at the same time it might not have been. If there were as many murderous women out there as there are just plain weird ones we’d all be in big trouble. Sure she was an odd girl, but that doesn’t make her an accessory to murder.”  
“Oh,” Omi sounded disappointed. Probably he was disappointed. “So you don’t think it was her, then.”  
“I think showing up and acting weird isn’t enough to justify chasing after her. We’d be harassing every third girl showed her face in here. Sure, she certainly _looks_ like the woman Ken described, but so do a lot of Goth girls…. It’s a pretty pretentious crowd, Omi. Even the eye could be contacts.”  
“She had the funny eye?” Straightening, Omi placed one finger to his own cheekbone. “Really?”  
“I told you, could have been contacts—”  
“Youji-kun.” Omi cut him off, quick and neat as that: he fell silent. “I think we probably need to get Ken-kun in on this. He knows who he saw. Can you tell him, when you go and see him?”  
And Youji smiled. He nodded. Said, “Sounds good to me…”

He hadn’t been planning on visiting Ken that evening, but how could he have told Omi that?  
____

Why did hospitals have to put the lights out so soon?

Half past nine. Ken hadn’t gone to bed that early since… well, since the last time he’d been in hospital, but all things being equal it would have been grade school. It should have been ridiculous to even think of going to bed at this time – he was almost nineteen, wasn’t he? Nineteen in December and damn near grown, but the truly funny thing was he genuinely felt as if he needed it. Half past nine and he was tired. Something about this place (the atmosphere, maybe: the constant noise or the bustling of the nurses and the orderlies, always so busy being busy) was wearing him out. Left him lying there exhausted hours before he’d normally have been thinking of sleeping and, when they’d given him his medication then snapped out the lights, it had come only as a relief.

And yet he couldn’t sleep. Ken couldn’t figure that one either. Here he was trapped in bed and so tired he could hardly think, and he couldn’t sleep. The over-starched hospital sheets seemed to clutch at him; he was lying all wrong and it should have been the work of a moment to turn over, but moving at all was a painful chore and God knew he didn’t want to bother the nurses again. All he could do was lie there, staring into the incomplete darkness, and wait for sleep.

Sleep was proving elusive. Maybe he needed to try reading for a bit, or… or something. Ken wasn’t sure he had anything else to read, he’d never been much of a one for novels and he’d read the magazines and _manga_ weeklies Omi had brought him ten times over already, but it beat lying there.

He groped for the call bell handset for what felt like the millionth time that day, running his fingers blindly over the buttons and trying to work out, by what little light seeped in from the corridor, which of them would turn on the lamp above his bed and which would have the nurses worried he’d fallen out of it. Yeah, that would be great going, wouldn’t it? Calling the nurses again just because he’d decided he wanted the damn lights on again after all…

Okay, the big button with the Braille on was probably the nurse call. That meant— _there_.

By sheer chance he had found it first time. The light left him blinking.

The magazines lay piled on his locker, and Ken reached for the nearest one quite blindly. It wasn’t until he had it in his hands that he realized there was something lying on top of it, something that, completely by chance, he had picked up with it. A slip of paper torn from a sketchpad with a picture upon it in soft gray pencils: a drawing, head and shoulders, of a pretty girl with a slender, unsmiling face and long, loose black hair and it was funny, wasn’t it, how very nearly _ashamed_ of the artwork Youji had seemed to be?

“Youji? I didn’t think I’d see you tonight, did something happen?”  
And Youji had smiled. Am I really that transparent, Kenken? You wound me…  “The girl came back,” he had said. “Omi wanted me to show you what she looked like.”  
Ken had blinked. Asked him, “Show me how?” (It wasn’t like Youji would have had a camera on him, was it?)  
“Well… I guess I could draw her.”

 _Draw_ her? Youji had been smiling as he said it and it had been all Ken that could do not to return it, though he didn’t have the first idea why. He’d just seemed so awkward about it, though! As if he had expected Ken to laugh and tell him not to be so stupid. Since when could _you_ draw?

But all Ken had said was, “Okay”.

Why not?

It had felt strange somehow, sitting there and watching Youji drawing, his head bowed over a spiral-bound sketchpad, all his attention focused on something Ken couldn’t see. The pencils and the sketchpad, though Ken knew nothing about art, had looked like they must have been expensive. They weren’t at all the kind of thing a guy would bother with buying unless he took drawing seriously, yet Youji’d never mentioned he could draw at all. Sitting propped up in bed and watching him work, it had been hard for Ken not to feel as if he’d stumbled on some kind of secret.

Youji, handing the picture over, had been almost shy, his smile saying, _it’s not very good_. That kind of self-conscious self-effacement, so typically Japanese, wasn’t something Ken would have expected to see coming from his friend either. Maybe it was different when it was something like this, something he’d had to make…

It was a good picture. And it was her all right.

“You’re sure?” Youji had asked him.  
“I’m sure.”

Why Youji had thought he’d have wanted to keep the damn thing though Ken couldn’t even begin to imagine. He knew who he’d seen. Why in Hell would he want her picture by his bedside? That was just damn creepy, really. Frowning, he gazed down at the girl’s unsmiling face, her mismatched eyes, for a long moment – then, with a sigh, he tucked the sketch inside the magazine and tossed it back onto the nightstand, turning the lights back off with a single definite _click_. No, he really wasn’t in the mood for reading.

He lay on his side, staring into nothing; he listened to the footsteps in the corridor, the muffled sound of the television in the room next door, the quiet chime of an infusion pump. A round-faced nurse peeped round the door and asked him if he felt all right, then left with a smile when Ken told her, just tired. No he didn’t want a sedative, thank you. He’d get to sleep by himself or not at all…

And then there’d been nothing for it but to wait, and hope sleep found him soon.

Ken supposed he must have slept after all, because when next he opened his eyes the ward was silent, the room quite dark. Even the light in the corridor had been shut out. It was never properly dark or quiet in hospital but tonight? Tonight both were close enough to touch and all he was thinking was _Jesus Christ_.

Somehow it wasn’t what he’d wanted at all. The silence unnerved him, the shadows, almost thick enough to choke on, left him feeling oppressed – was it that? It had to be that, what else was there? All he had was silence and shadow and there was something _wrong_ here.

(Wasn’t there?)

Raising his head Ken blinked into the darkness, his eyes darting from one corner of the room to the other, searching for – what? He didn’t know. He could see nothing. He almost said, _who’s there—_

Which was ridiculous! Of course there wasn’t anybody there.

Of course there wasn’t. That thickening of the shadows in the corner of the room… how could it have been the shadow of a person? It was the drugs or the after-effects of sleep, or both; God knew how many times he’d bugged the nurses back in the burns unit because he’d thought the room was on fire or somesuch thoroughly embarrassing drug-induced shit. Mary mother of God, next thing he knew he’d be asking Youji or someone to chase out the monsters underneath the goddamn _bed_ before he left for the night.

He was being stupid. Of course he was. Angry with himself, Ken sighed. He snatched at the button of the morphine pump – how stupid to blame the drugs and then take more, but what choice did he have? – and turned his back on the thing that wasn’t there.

Because there was nothing. How _could_ there have been? That was impossible. It was impossible, right?

Of course it was.  
____

“It’s her,” Youji said. “The same girl. Ken’s convinced of it.”

Omi, sat at the kitchen table surrounded by files and printouts and looking for all the world like a kid in the middle of his homework, not the leader of a team of assassins planning their latest hit, smiled; Aya, sat opposite the boy with his hands before him and a mug of steaming black coffee sitting disregarded by his elbow as if it had nothing whatsoever to do with him, seemed to relax a little. Youji returned the smile simply for form’s sake. It hadn’t been what he wanted to hear and he didn’t understand why it hadn’t. It was just… well, something in him felt weirdly let down, that was all.

(Let down?)

He hadn’t wanted Carmilla to have anything to do with it. He’d liked her better when she was just an offbeat, slightly pretentious girl, when there’d been absolutely no reason for her strangeness. It was disappointing to have her prove so utterly explicable.

“That’s something,” Omi said, and his voice was every bit as cheerful as his smile. “Well done, Youji-kun.”  
“It’s nothing,” Youji said, and meant it. The last thing he wanted was Omi _thanking_ him for it. “Now what?”  
“Well…” Omi hesitated. Said, “She isn’t working alone, is she? The police are sure the killer’s a male. The forensic evidence alone… hang on a second.” He searched quickly through the papers spread out in front of him, rifling the sheaf of documents sure as a gambler shuffling a deck of cards, extracting a printout of a police photograph. “Look, this is the bite mark on Ken-kun’s neck. It’s clearly a man’s.”  
Aya raised his head. Said, “And they’re sure of this?”  
“Mm.” Leaning forward, Omi handed Aya the paper, stabbing one finger at the photograph. “See here, Aya-kun. A woman’s palette is shaped like a parabola, but this was U-shaped. That proves whoever left that mark was a man, and it looks to me as if he must have filed his teeth. That’s not something you can easily hide. If Youji-kun’s girl—”  
“Carmilla.”  
“Carmilla, thank you. If Carmilla filed her teeth I’m sure Youji-kun would have noticed it by now, right? She’s definitely the accomplice if Ken-kun says she’s the one, but that’s all she is. That means we’re going to have to find out who she’s working with somehow.”  
Aya said, “He’s probably her lover.” It was only the truth, but somehow that wasn’t what Youji had wanted to hear either.  
“Mm. It seems likely. Youji-kun, can I leave that with you?”  
Youji nodded. Said, with an insouciance he was a long way from feeling, “Sure.”

(He knew an order when he heard it.)

And that, as far as Omi was concerned, took care of that. He tucked the printout he held away again and turned back to his paperwork, casually pushing a pile of printouts away from him, dragging another over. Silently, he flipped through the first few pages, then nodded. All right, then…

“Aya-kun, there’s something I’d like you to look into, if it’s not too much trouble. It might be a coincidence, but… well, there’s no harm checking, right?”  
Aya’s only comment on the matter was to nod and look grave and _okay_ , Youji thought, _I’ll bite_. “Looking into what?”  
“Well, this may come to nothing but I think there’s another survivor. Her name’s Mitsuru Hirata but she calls herself Jeanne. She’s twenty-three years old and lives in Nerima-ku.”  
 _Jeanne_? Only one kind of woman, in Youji’s experience, gave herself that kind of silly foreign name. “She’s a bar hostess?”  
“Actually she is… she works for Club La Belle in Kabukichou. Youji-kun, Aya-kun, could you take a look at this?”

Youji quirked a brow, frowning at the printout Omi handed him: an incident report of a disturbance in a private home. The police had been called to Hirata-san’s apartment early in the morning of June 1st. Hirata often came home late and according to her neighbor – Teruo Otani, a twenty-seven-year-old PE teacher working at Hikarigaoka High School – sometimes brought clients home with her. She knew it was risky but what else could she do? It was her job.

When he was woken at three in the morning by the sound of a woman’s screams, Otani had presumed the worst. He had burst into Hirata’s apartment to find her struggling in the arms of a young man, who was trying to pin her to the couch. When Otani shouted at him to stop the stranger let Hirata go and ran for it. Otani had been all prepared to hold him at the door but the guy had jumped out of the window, and her apartment was on the third floor…

If it hadn’t been for the bushes beneath Mitsuru’s window breaking his fall, he almost certainly would have been killed.

“Mitsuru thought it was an attempted rape,” Omi said, “and the police report treats it as one which would explain why Kritiker didn’t tell us about this, but from what I can see… well he bit her, didn’t he? It all sounds rather like our Vampire Killer. Only he was interrupted.”  
“Rapists _do_ bite sometimes,” Youji said, tossing the printouts back to the table, “but generally not as a kickoff. You’re right, this guy was after something else. When’d he kill the postman again?”  
“The 6th. That’s just under a week later.”  
Youji nodded, one hand at his chin. “Certainly sounds like our guy. Shame the description’s so crappy…”  
“Did she give a name?” Aya asked.  
“He told her he was called Sakiji Sato,” Omi said, “but they’re pretty sure it was a fake. Aya-kun, do you think you could go and talk to this woman? If she’s a bar girl and this man was her client they must have spoken a bit before she went home with him, right? Maybe she’ll know something.”

Aya simply nodded. Sweeping his copy of the police report up off the table, he got to his feet and, without so much as a backward glance, walked briskly to the door. Youji watched him for just long enough to be sure he wasn’t coming back, then pounced on the forgotten coffee. Well, waste not, want not…

“Hey, Omi,” he said, “are you sure you want _Aya_ to handle this? Shouldn’t I go talk to the girl?”  
Omi just smiled and his smile was an apology in itself. “Actually, Youji-kun, I think it might be better if you concentrated on Carmilla. She’s our best lead right now and it sounds like she likes you, I think we need to make the most of that. What do you know about her?”  
“Well… not a lot. All I really know is what you’d get from looking at her. She’s about twenty, she’s into the loli-goth thing and she thinks it’s a good idea to name herself after a vampire, God knows what she’s really called after all that. Oh, and she said she sung in a band.”  
“She’s a singer?” Omi echoed: for a moment that was it. The boy simply frowned thoughtfully, raising one hand to his lips – then his expression cleared. He smiled. Said, “That’s it! Youji-kun, why don’t you say you work for… I don’t know the names. An idol agency, Ken-kun might have heard of some. You could say your bosses are thinking of offering her a contract and you need to know if there’s any scandals in her past that would make that unwise. We’re bound to find out something that way, right?”  
“Well…” Youji hesitated. Said, “Do I have to like it?”

Omi’s head snapped up; he blinked once, twice, gazing up at his friend with wide, baffled blue eyes. Then he laughed, shaking his head, and Youji laughed with him. Honestly, Youji-kun, what kind of a question was that?

It hardly seemed worth mentioning that it hadn’t been a joke.

 

 _to be continued._


End file.
